Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know where you got this from, but I can assure you that's not correct.
Polyurethane is a type of plastic, and is the most common wood finish for floors.
But most common != always, as you claimed.
Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
141–150 of 207 posts
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#142Hardwood in the USA is mostly farm grown, so I'm not concerned.
I've seen a good deal of wood at USA's Home Depots that isn't grown in the USA.
Last time I bought some pine lumber for a project at Home Depot there was a bunch from New Zealand and a bunch from USA, the stuff from New Zealand was cut to much better precision.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#143To be spending a lot of time working in the rainforest in Peru where logging (legal and illegal) is everywhere, you can't trace properly. Certificates are easy to forge, the entire pipeline is pen and paper. How can you tell once the legal wood and the illegal wood are in a container which is which? You can't. So many people here are outraged, how many of you are supporting on the ground teams protecting rainforests?…
I'm always torn between building things out of wood vs. other materials.
I hate cutting down trees. But at the same time wood seems like a way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere into things that will last a very, very long time. It seems like I could build carbon-negative furniture out of wood, as opposed to carbon-positive furniture out of other materials. As long as those trees are re-planted. I want assurance that when I buy lumber it's regenerative.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people just don't care or never knew the difference. Like keming, once you notice it, you will likely notice for the rest of your life.
Yes. There is no way the extra costs of real hardwood are worth the supposed benefits, to me. LVP or LVT or whatever vinyl name is just so much cheaper and easier to work with, and as long as the floor is clean and presentable, the only difference I see is wood flooring being more expensive.
Have you ever lived in a house with real wood floors? The difference you feel barefoot is quite noticeable. It may not be worth the cost to you, but it is definitely different.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or if there’s a way to ruin the wood for woodworking without killing the tree itself. It seems like you would need to do something really clever. Inject it with capsaicin?
Tree spiking is one example of this. It's so common as to be illegal in the United States [1]. Unfortunately, without strict worker protections, it's conceivable that workers would be the ones to pay for their employers' (or their upstream suppliers') illegal actions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking
It's not just conceivable, it is real.
Workers in the mill are the ones who will die or suffer significant trauma when the blade hits the spike.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#146In 2020, the then president of Brazil said he would reveal which countries were the consumers of the illegally extracted wood from Amazonia. [0] No further news were heard about it. There were even a startup that would use DNA to certify the origin of the wood, allowing traceability. The "efforts to halt trade in illegal timber such as the EU Timber Regulation and the US Lacey Act" can greatly contribute to reduce th…
Another side of this is you really want to put economic value on sustainably harvesting these trees and preserving the forest, because if you say "no harvesting at all" then it's more profitable for someone to burn the forest down and replace it with cattle. Years ago tracking lumber from harvesting through the supply chain was one of the few convincing cases I heard for blockchain applications, where you have a sequ…
It's also a good spot to try out the "free-market ecology"[1] economic system, where all resources extracted from the earth are included in a receipt to the end user of the product.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#147This article was obsolete before it was written.
The species commercially traded as Ipe (Handroanthus spp., Roseodendron spp. and Tabebuia spp.) were submitted by Columbia and Panama last year for inclusion in CITES Appendix II. This submission was accepted, meaning that the international trade in these woods will be subject to strict controls as of 25 November 2024. Any international trade must be accompanied by an export permit issued by a national Management Authority, certifying that the wood was harvested in a manner that is compatible with the long-term survival of the species.
CITES enforcement is no joke and the listing of Ipe in Appendix II is likely to hugely reduce demand, due to the substantial bureaucratic burden and legal risk that importers will be exposed to. Guitarists will be all too familiar with the impact of CITES, following the listing of Rosewood in Appendix II in 2017. Until an exemption for musical instruments was negotiated in 2019, guitars with rosewood fingerboards practically disappeared from the market - the risks for importers and distributors were simply too great to reasonably manage.
https://cites.org/sites/default/files/eng/cop/19/prop/as_rec...
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue there is zero point in using real hardwood on floors these days given vinyl planks are way cheaper, way more durable, and look nearly indistinguishable from real thing.
Hardwood floors can be re-sanded and refinished many times over, generating no waste. Vinyl floors get scratched and then thrown away. Wood is renewable, vinyl comes from oil wells. I'm not certain this is actually logical.
They can be, but how often are they in the time a home is owned by a single person?
I mean if you care about waste single family homes are very inefficient.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardwood floors can be re-sanded and refinished many times over, generating no waste. Vinyl floors get scratched and then thrown away. Wood is renewable, vinyl comes from oil wells. I'm not certain this is actually logical.
And you feel it, barefoot, touching it, it feels more natural. Hardwood floors cleans better too, more hygienic. Hard to put into words.
Don’t wear outdoor shoes inside.
We asians figured this out generations ago.
Re: Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
#150This reminds me of "we only harvest X ebony trees" nonsense when what they mean is "we only _buy_ X amount of ebony, and we pay more for pure black, so people cut down many trees to find the relatively rare pure black ones"
This has been an area of interest among musicians. I don't know how much of demand we account for. At this point it is widely accepted that ebony doesn't have to be jet black. The fingerboard of my double bass is a beautiful piece of ebony that is basically dark brown. I'm perfectly happy with it.